Theistic
Psychology is the scientific discovery of
spiritual laws given in rational scientific
revelations.

The Swedenborg
Encyclopedia of Theistic Psychology is a
collection of my articles, lecture notes, and books on
topics generated from my study of the Writings of Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish scientist who left behind
a collection of some 30 volumes on what I consider to be
Theistic Psychology. Neither Swedenborg nor his commentators
and followers used this expression, but as a psychologist I
felt it was appropriate to describe the psychological
content of his work in that way. "Theistic" means that it
assumes the positive bias regarding God.

Theistic psychology contrasts
with atheistic or nontheistic psychology which assumes the
negative bias regarding God. In the
negative bias psychology (nontheistic) any
explanatory account that relies on God as cause is defined
as unscientific. In the positive bias psychology (theistic)
any explanatory account that does not rely on God as cause
is defined as unscientific. For example, nontheistic
psychology explains the human growth process and its
developmental anatomy without ever mentioning God in the
account. In contrast theistic psychology obtains all its
information, data, and principles from God's Speech, also
known as Sacred Scripture -- not Sacred Scripture in its
literal historical sense, but Sacred Scripture in its
correspondential sense.

Swedenborg's greatest
accomplishment in my view is the rediscovery of the Divine
laws of correspondences that are imparted to humanity
through Sacred Scripture given at various times in time and
place in history. The literal sense of each Sacred Scripture
is clearly geographic, ethnic, and historical, so that when
you compare the literal meaning of the various Sacred
Scripture we know of, there is a clash, an antipathy, a
contradiction, even hatred and racism. This state of affairs
would hardly become a great potentate on earth, let alone
the all powerful universal God! There must be a rational
explanation for the intellectual diversity and mutual
aversion that God has created between these different
versions of "His Word."

Swedenborg gives the rational solution to
this awesome historical and scientific puzzle.

All genuine Sacred
Scripture is indeed Divine Speech itself -- not in the
literal sense of the expressions and words, but in their
correspondential sense that needs to be accessed through
translation rules presented in the Writings of Swedenborg.

In the positive bias of theistic psychology the
Writings of Swedenborg are Divine revelations ordinarily
called Sacred Scripture. Other Sacred
Scripture known today include the Old Testament, the New
Testament, the Koran (Qu'ran), the Hindu Scriptures, the
Baha'i' Scriptures, and some others. The identification of
whether some work is Sacred Scripture involves the attempt
to access its correspondential sense as known from other
Sacred Scripture already identified.

Swedenborg is the only known
scientist in history who had empirical observational access
to the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture by direct
sensuous consciousness. At age 57 the well known European
scientist and publisher, Baron Emanuel Swedenborg of Sweden,
suddenly found himself conscious and awake in a dual
universe, one natural through his physical body, the other
spiritual through his mental body which he called "spirit
body." He lived the next 27 years as a dual citizen,
interacting socially in this world of time, where he was a
busy government mining engineer; and simultaneously also
being conscious in the spiritual world of the afterlife and
eternity, where he interacted with all the people he had
known before their death, and all the authors and historical
personalities he had known from the world's literature.

No credible scientist before Swedenborg, or
since, exists who has provided a rational and fully integrated
scientific account of the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture . Due to his dual awareness
Swedenborg was able to read his Bible in Hebrew and Greek
with his natural mind, and simultaneously with his spiritual
mind. As he came upon each word and each expression in the
natural sense, he observed directly their correspondential
sense by looking around him and observing what was
happening. He documents what he saw with each expression and
word including numbers, days of the week, names of people
and places, and double expressions that appear mere synonyms
or hyperbole, as well the mythical animals and battles and
visionary events. Through these empirical observations
Swedenborg produces a dictionary of correspondences
contextually presented in series of volumes that give a word
by word analysis of the major portions of the Bible.

Anyone reading and studying
these semantic demonstrations can acquire the rational logic
that governs the laws of correspondences. Every human being
has an intrinsic understanding of correspondences, though
only some people are aware of it while living in this world.
But anyone can rationally study the correspondences that
govern their own mind-body connections. These are familiar
to us as similes and metaphors when we talk about mental
things as if they were physical (e.g., "he is a brain" (hi
is intelligent); "let's hake on it" (agreeing), "he was
deeply wounded" (hurt pride), etc.).

If you apply the laws of correspondences to
Sacred Scripture the literal sense completely vanishes from
semantic focus. Instead of "Jacob" we read "the natural
mind"; instead of "Jerusalem" we read "theistic science";
and "Rachel" becomes "rational truth" while her "handmaiden"
becomes "natural truth"; all numbers involving 4 (like
"forty days in the desert") signify "mental states of
temptation during regeneration"; and "flood" refers to
"inability to resist temptations and hence becoming wicked
and evil." And so on. Swedenborg shows that reading the
Bible through the correspondential sense gives access to a
textbook of theistic psychology or science.

Divine Speech is Divine Truth, absolute and
infinite. To communicate this truth to the human race the
elements of Divine Speech are transformed into semantic
correspondences. These Divine thoughts or meanings descend in
rational and scientific series into the highest layers of the
human mind called the celestial heavens. Swedenborg was able
to compare the language and script of Sacred
Scripture that was given to the celestial and spiritual
societies in eternity. When people die they are resuscitated
within 30 hours and awaken in the afterlife of eternity.
They discover that this world is a mental world. Things and
people around them can come and go, appear and disappear,
and so is their house, or any object or animal. The
afterlife of eternity behaves like dreams, It's all very
familiar. It is the mental world into which we we born to
begin with but somehow had our consciousness restricted to
the physical world of time and matter.

On earth things are solid and remain put. You
can't wish a person out of your sight. You can't walk out of a
closed room. You can't see someone not present. But it's
different in your dreams. If your wedding reception room is
too small you dream up a bigger one to accommodate thousands
of guests and you create more food up to your will. It is the
same in the mental world of eternity, once you are detached
from the physical world. Swedenborg was a unique case in that
he was able to interact in the afterlife of eternity while he
was still attached to his physical body and natural life. He
called this state "the greatest miracle the Lord has given
since creation." Without a person having these experiences our
knowledge of eternity would be restricted to the literal sense
of Sacred Scripture, and this provides
almost no details whatsoever regarding what the afterlife is
like.

Historically the work of
Swedenborg has been treated as theology and religion, which
explains why he is not mentioned in the history of
psychology. But this was my insight, or new perspective, as
I studied Swedenborg's work and discovered in it a complete
scientific and empirical account of the human mind.

The theistic psychology in Swedenborg's Writings
is so hidden that experts and admirers of his work for the
past 200 years of active Swedenborgian literature, have failed
to see it, or have seen in it something psychological, but
never a systematic empirical science of psychology. It is
important to understand why this has occurred. For the first
few years of my study of Swedenborg's multi-volume works I
could recognize the importance of his observations to
psychology but did not see that it presented a complete
scientific account of the human mind. Instead, I saw it as
"spiritual psychology" that is relevant and useful for
psychology.

The long evolution of my understanding of
Swedenborg's Writings was assisted by what others have written
and charted regarding his ideas. This collateral literature is
given credit and reference in many of the articles and books
in this Encyclopedia. I saw my unique function as presenting
Swedenborg's work through concepts and theoretical accounts
that are comprehensible to college students taking a course in
Advanced Psychology. This means that I needed to address the
issue of scientific rigor and method. I had to present
Swedenborg's work as a full fledged empirical science of
psychology having the defining characteristics of a scientific
discipline -- namely, presence of empirical data,
repeatability and stability of observations, and rational
coherence and consistency in theoretical explanations
involving cause-effect chains of phenomena.

The issue of scientific rigor and definition is
repeatedly addressed in various ways throughout several
volumes, and especially Volume 1, Introduction to Theistic
Psychology where it is discussed as The Negative and Positive
Bias in Science (Section
1.0.6). Psychology as it is known today aligns itself
with a categorical non-theistic perspective, denying that God
is part of the reality that science needs to address. There is
also the denial of the afterlife and the world of eternity.
These denials are rightly called the "negative bias in
science" since there is no proof given or even attempted to
show that God is not part of reality and the cause-effect
phenomena of the universe. In this non-theistic perspective
there is no room for Swedenborg's theistic science. Hence it
is understandable that he is not mentioned in the history of
psychology. It is important to understand that
non-theistic psychology maintains a negative bias against
theism despite the lack of any evidence for such a denial.
This is why it is called a bias.

It is also the case that the acceptance of
God's existence in theistic psychology is also a bias for
which proof is not given. Theistic psychology takes up
the positive bias position that God exists, and then examines
the evidence to see if it makes rational sense to maintain
this bias in science. Scientists must now examine this
perspective rationally and scientifically to see if it is
methodologically feasible and useful in increasing scientific
knowledge and understanding of the human mind. The positive
bias perspective in psychology allows scientists and students
to examine the evidence and rationale for theistic psychology.
The negative bias in psychology denies this evidence in
advance, hence cannot objectively examine the evidence that
Swedenborg presents.

It makes rational sense therefore to adopt the
positive bias in order to have the opportunity to examine the
evidence Swedenborg is presenting. The purpose of the Swedenborg Encyclopedia of Theistic
Psychology is to present the evidence for the
scientific knowledge of God extracted from the
correspondential sense of the Writings of Swedenborg.

I discovered this unique
collection in 1981 in our university library and was truly
amazed that it is not cited and known in the scientific
literature, and in particular, Psychology, a field that I
had been teaching for twenty years at that time (Ph.D.,
1962, McGill University). I started writing about what
I was reading in the Writings of Swedenborg, and in 1995,
when I created my Web
site on Swedenborg, I sought a way of integrating my
notes and articles for public presentation, and the result
was this Swedenborg Encyclopedia of Theistic Psychology. Its
prior name was the Swedenborg Glossary.

The main themes in this
Encyclopedia are God, spirituality, rationality, afterlife,
the mind's anatomy, scientific dualism, heaven and hell,
regeneration. These are topics that Swedenborg discusses
from first hand observation. I try to reference my
discussions by citing Swedenborg throughout the text of
every entry article. I try to be specific about the
citation, using the standard citation style used by
Swedenborgian scholars that refers the reader to the
original Book and Paragraph Number. Swedenborg numbered all
his paragraphs, which actually consisted of several
sub-paragraphs, so that very specific citations are
possible. Further, most of the 30 volume set of his
"theological" Writings can be accessed and searched by the
public at:
www.theheavenlydoctrines.org/

Swedenborg was the only
scientist in history who had the gift of dual
consciousness. This refers to his ability to be
awake simultaneously in his physical body, as the rest of us
are, and in his "spirit-body," which normally does not occur
until our
resuscitation or awakening from the dying process
which, as observed by Swedenborg numerous times, lasts for
about thirty hours relative to this world. He reported
that this conscious awareness of the "spirit-body" while
still alive in the physical body, was given to him by God,
who appeared to him and sent him off to his Divine writing
and publishing mission, which was, that he shall write up as
a scientist what information he could gather by this special
observation technique. He was 57 at the time and he passed
on at 83. This Divine process of "intromission" of his
consciousness into the spirit-body in the spiritual world is
according to Swedenborg, the "greatest miracle the Lord has
granted since creation." And this new gift to humanity was
for the sake of the development of
rational
spirituality.

The advantage of assuming the positive bias in
psychology is that it opens up a new source of knowledge that
is unavailable to the negative bias non-theistic psychology.
This new resource is known to people in all cultures since the
beginning of human history as Sacred
Scripture. There is a long and active tradition of
research and study of Sacred Scripture in every culture.
Theology and religion are always based on the literal meaning
of Sacred Scripture, each religion and ethnic group having
their own Sacred Scripture given to them by Divine revelation
through a prophet or revelator. In Western Christian
literature there have been made many attempts to use the Bible
to justify a religious belief or rule of life. The specific
case of Creationism is discussed in
Section
1.8.9Theistic Science: The Scientific Alternative
to Creationism and Intelligent Design. Theistic
psychology is not based on the literal meaning of Sacred
Scripture, as religions are, but on its correspondential sense
(Section
1.0.5.5.5).

The topic of correspondences is the central
focus of all of theistic psychology as science, e.g. in
these Sections of the
Theistic
Psychology Volumes:

1.1.4.3.2
Extracting the Content of Divine Speech Through
Correspondences

What was unknown and
unsuspected until the revelations of the Writings of
Swedenborg in the 18th century, is that the Old and New
Testaments are written in a language that expresses
psychological facts not directly, but in "correspondences."
Further, every genuine Sacred Scripture in all cultures and
traditions is written in the same scientific language of
correspondences in which spiritual realities are expressed
in words and meanings that are the natural correspondences
to these spiritual ideas. In other words, every idea
stemming from natural observation is a correspondence for an
idea stemming from spiritual facts. This is equally true of
objects: every physical object or operation is the effect,
whose cause is a spiritual object or operation, the two
cause-effect being linked by the law of correspondences that
governs the relation between the natural world and the
spiritual world.

The self-evident discovery I made while
researching these topics in Swedenborg's Writings is the
greatest piece of news science has ever received: and it is
this: that the spiritual world of the afterlife in eternity
= the mental world. (see
Section
1.0.1). Every human being is
born
into a dual universe tied by correspondence. At birth we
acquire a physical body that is tied by correspondence to a
mental body (or "spirit-body"). All mental operations occur
not in the brain but in the mind, that is, in the anatomical
organs that make up the mind in the mental body. The mental
body is immortal. Upon the death of the physical body the
mental body continues conscious life in the mental world of
eternity known as the afterlife of heaven and hell -- see
Section 1.1.4
(F) Sixth Conclusion: The Eternity of the Afterlife is
Our Mental World Now.

Correspondences occur in Sacred Scripture
because Divine Speech originates them --
see
Section
15.0.1.1 The Scientific Meaning of Genesis, as an
illustration of the method of extracting psychological
knowledge from Sacred Scrioture. As Divine Speech descends
from God and enters the mental world of humanity and thus of
every individual, it descends across the layers of the human
mind until it reaches the external layer of natural culture
and history. Throughout this descent Divine Speech is
transformed at each layer so that each lower layer is a
correspondence of the prior upper layer.
Correspondences govern mental phenomena in the mental world
of eternity and they also govern physical phenomena in time
and place.

The action of correspondences
is the scientific mechanism that governs the interaction
between every natural phenomenon as an effect, with its
corresponding spiritual phenomenon as its cause. For
example, the names of the people and places mentioned in all
Sacred Scripture are symbolic references to mental states,
and so are numbers, objects, actions, and events. Swedenborg
verified with his dual consciousness the observational fact
that whenever he read the Bible in the physical body he was
able to see the correspondence of each word and phrase
appear before him in the spirit body.

The process is fully
confirmed scientifically by the reversal effect, namely,
that whenever he was discussing psychological topics about
mental states while he was conscious in his spirit-body, he
observed the sensory effects of the discussion all around
him in the world of spirits. For example, when he was
talking to people there who are mentally in evil states, the
environment around them became darker, the sky was filled
with dark clouds, the surroundings showed caverns, stinking
marshes, and screeching poisonous animals and insects. But
when he was speaking with the inhabitants of heaven, the
surrounding environment showed beautiful houses and gardens
on bright and sunny streets, with wonderful fragrances,
melodious sounds, and friendly animals.

What is amazing is that there
was a one to one relationship or mechanism between
particular objects in the environment and specific topics of
discussion, to such an extent, that the people there, who
all live in a marvelous spirit-body, are able to tell from a
distance what a person is thinking and feeling, merely by
looking at the surround that gets instantiated wherever
people are in the spiritual world.

The mechanism that produces
these natural looking environments in the spiritual world of
the afterlife is exactly the same mechanism that is in the
natural language in which all Sacred Scriptures were
written. Of course the existence of the secret language of
correspondences was not known to the authors of the Old and
New Testaments, but the visions and events they wrote down
were inspired into them by God so that only those details
were written down that will make a scientific series of
linked concepts and explanations when translating the
natural into its correspondential sense. What is
extraordinary and amazing is that the correspondential
sense of the Old and New Testament books form an
uninterrupted rational series of meanings and explanations
about the human mind -- a textbook or encyclopedia of the
mind's anatomy and immortal development. Swedenborg
demonstrated this for the Old and New Testament Sacred
Scriptures.

This alone proves that the
Old and New Testaments is Divine, for how could dozens of
uneducated pre-scientific authors, writing about their
inspired visions, come up with a literal sequence of
sentences that then form a meaningful rational unit
together, in the whole of the Old and New Testament. Can
you imagine another rational explanation?

Theistic psychology shows
that this also applies to the Writings Sacred Scripture, and
to other Sacred Scripture (see
Section
15.0.4 Ancient Forms of Sacred Scripture and Their
Derivatives. And see
Section
1.0.1.3 Revelation: Divine Speech Exteriorizing as
Sacred Scripture).

Today anyone regardless of
background can read these Divine scientific revelations and
have a complete rational understanding of God and how we are
to prepare for our afterlife, which begins in the
spirit-body just a few hours after death of the physical
body, as observed thousands of times by Swedenborg, and
described by him in scientific detail. This is what the Swedenborg
Encyclopedia of Theistic Psychology is about --
my attempt to be of service to others by describing them in
the modern terms of scientific psychology in which I was
trained and have functioned now for over four decades.

This is not a difficult task
for me, but a joyous one that has changed my life and
brought me enlightenment and love. Now everyone can examine
in a scientific way the mysteries of their faith and
philosophy. The One God of the universe who takes care of
every person, moment by moment to eternity, has now given
humanity this most precious of all revelations that
completes the creation of the human mind into an angelic
person with supernatural powers and virtues of love and
wisdom. The lot of such a person is heavenly bliss to
eternity. Take charge of your eternity! It makes sense to do
so! What can be more important than that? And the entry
point to heaven is by means of rational spirituality in the
mind.

... one true thing
does not affirm something good, but many truths
do, for one true thing without connection with
others does not affirm, but when there are many
it does, for from one, another can be seen. One
thing does not produce any form, thus no
quality, but many things, connected in a series,
do so. As a single tone does not produce a
chorus, still less a harmony, neither does a
single truth ...

Nothing is more
important than to know how the will and
understanding make one mind.E.
SwedenborgTCR
397

At
the death of the material body, when it's no
longer responsive to the mind's will and
thought, we awaken in the spiritual body, thus
ending our dual citizenship. From then on,
to forever, our mind lives in our immortal
spiritual body. How do I know this?
Swedenborg, according to his own detailed
scientific records, was given thousands of
occasions by which to experiment with this
process of "extraction of the mind from the
physical body" and its subsequent phase of
resuscitation and preparation for conscious life
in the spiritual world. This life is
entirely different in actuality, though on the
surface, it may appear similar to the life we
led on earth. Further details are given in
Heaven
and Hell. I mention these details
here because they are a necessary part to
understanding mental growth and regeneration.

TCR
791. NOTE. - After this work was finished the
Lord called together His twelve disciples who
followed Him in the world; and the next day He
sent them all forth throughout the whole
spiritual world to preach the Gospel that THE
LORD GOD JESUS CHRIST reigns, whose kingdom
shall be for ages and ages, according to the
prediction in Daniel (7:13, 14), and in
Revelation (11:15).

Also
that blessed are those that come to the marriage
supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9).

This
took place on the nineteenth day of June, 1770.
This is what is meant by these words of the
Lord:

He
shall send His angels and they shall gather
together His elect, from the end of the heavens
to the end thereof (Matt. 24:31).